7:00 AM
Paul B
As many people know, TrueCrypt has been discontinued since 2014. The developers said that TrueCrypt had some unfixed security issues. In 2015 the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology conducted an audit on the last stable release of TrueCrypt, and although they did find a number of bugs, they came to the conclusion that it is still secure when data is at rest.
That being said, since TrueCrypt is no longer being developed, if you are still using it you should move to something that is actively being developed. Now, there are lots of encryption solutions today. Most modern operating systems have some form of disk encryption built in now. Microsoft has BitLocker, Linux has LUKS. You get the idea right? What if you really liked the way TrueCrypt worked though? What if you liked that TrueCrypt was multi-platform? Then in my opinion, you only have one serious alternative.
That alternative is VeraCrypt! From their page:
VeraCrypt picks up from where TrueCrypt left and it adds enhanced security to the algorithms used for system and partitions encryption making it immune to new developments in brute-force attacks.
VeraCrypt also solves many vulnerabilities and security issues found in TrueCrypt. It can load TrueCrypt volume and it offers the possibility to convert TrueCrypt containers and non-system partitions to VeraCrypt format. This enhanced security adds some delay only to the opening of encrypted partitions without any performance impact to the application use phase.
This is acceptable to the legitimate owner but it makes it much more harder for an attacker to gain access to the encrypted data.Now, to be fair, there is another fork of TrueCrypt called CipherShed, but they only have a pre-compiled version for Windows. If you want to use it on Mac or Linux, you need to compile it yourself. Not to mention, they don't issue releases as frequently as VeraCrypt.
Some cool things I like about VeraCrypt are that the layout is very similar to that of TrueCrypt, and I'm already used to that. Also VeraCrypt offers some other encryption algorithms that TrueCrypt did not. Those algorithms are Camellia and Kuznyechik.
They also have some other hash options.
I'll be honest, I am still using TrueCrypt on my VPS email server. I'm not terribly worried about it because it should still be able to protect my emails at rest if my VPS is shutdown to reset the root password without my permission. Still though, I'm making plans to migrate to a new VPS when Ubuntu 18.04 LTS comes out, and when that day comes I'm going to make the switch to VeraCrypt!
Do you still use TrueCrypt? Do you think you will make the change to VeraCrypt? Why or why not? Let us know in the comments!
